At Open Ulysses, we’re turning every word of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” into a clickable link.
Some links reflect the current state of the world, some capture modern culture, others are just playfully weird or totally random.
We’ve added a few pro-Ukrainian links, because we believe: supporting Ukraine is important. Can you suggest a few more?
lol I feel like somebody is trolling me hard right now.
At a broad level it is called Ulysses, another name for the Odyssey, and the Odyssey is a perfect metaphor for the Ukraine war itself. Not the war, but the journey of the Odyssey…
It wasn’t supposed to take very long was it?
The Ulysses is a subversion of the hero’s journey though, DON’T get lost in the joseph campbell direction. Yes, it is a hero’s journey but the point much like the point of moby dick is that life isn’t about the quest (it isn’t about the damn white whale ok, it is about how people in power get obsessed with white whales and miss life going on around them and then die). Ulysses sees the hero’s journey everywhere in a sort of hyperparanoid state where everything becomes an extension of one monomaniacal belief or explanation.
Writers since have missed the nuance here that Ulysses was designed to disarm the monomania of the hero’s journey not elevate it to a position of infinite supremacy as the core of what stories are. Ulysses has much more in common with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain than the Odyssey itself. Yes, aesthetically and structurally there are a lifetime of parallels to be mapped between the Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, what I am saying is the humanist soul of Ulysses is no different than The Magic Mountain, neither are books about warriors at least in any traditional sense of the word… and yet they are…
In the metaphor here, both the western industrial complex that has refused to fully help Ukraine and Russia both fold into the role of England as an overbearing imperial power. In many ways it can be argued that Ireland was a prototype for modern western capitalism and imperialism.
James Joyce was good friends with Hemingway who fought in the Spanish Civil War and was a proud anti-fascist.
https://www.openculture.com/2024/06/james-joyce-picked-drunken-fights-then-hid-behind-hemingway.html
In James Joyce’s later work Finnegans Wake the duality of two brothers is a central motif, Shem the penman/the writer and Shaun the brawn and raw masculine strength to do. It is an obvious interpretation of James Joyce’s duality here as between James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway who were drinking friends. James Joyce admired that Hemingway was not only an artist but could fight, but Hemingway admired that Joyce was a writer who simply did not care what the world was ready for and wasn’t.
Like the Ukraine war, Ulysses was not supposed to win, the publication battle that went on just to physically print Ulysses is absolutely bonkers and if you ever doubted women were capable of being terrifying soldiers just read this book and you won’t lol.
Ulysses was written mostly in Trieste, in exile from Dublin, that is the MOST important thing to understand about the novel. It is easy to flippantly ask why on earth someone would commit such endless page upon page of innane detail as if that could be art, but if you look up from the book at Palestine or the war torn parts of Ukraine… suddenly you understand how deeply Ulysses is an act of resistance on every level imaginable. James Joyce sought to transmute some essential element of his home (as problematic of a place as it was for him) into a landscape that could not be bombed, stolen by landlords, corrupted or flattened by bulldozers… and that he could visit again.
While Italo Calvino crafted a masterpiece in Invisible Cities, James Joyce airlifted a ghost simulcrum of Dublin as it was in a moment into the air forever in all its imperfection reflected through his life experienece there in a way that centers the city as the nexus of literature in the English language whether the aloof academic english literature world has fully admitted it yet or not. Appreciate how hilarious it is then that the book was also a purposeful middle finger to the conservatism of the Catholic church strangling Ireland, and thus the book is literally set on the day that James Joyce’s actual wife Nora Barnacle went on a first date with James Joyce and gave him a handy J at Howth Castle.
yes
I would love to add a bunch to this, but yeah… I mean this is almost like too big of a question for me to answer in one go…
To other curious readers I would highly suggest the audibook version that is on the Internet Archive for free (free as in you can download the audio files directly). It is a full radioplay with casted voice actors and everything, it is superb and I think really helps gives you a context for how radically different of a work Ulysses is, even today it still will shock you with the way it simply isn’t what you expected it to be.
https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook-Merged/
https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/ireland-rejected-james-joyce-did
For Joyce, the fragments are always Irish, always from Dublin, but arranged in a Homeric pattern. This European complexity is what makes the question of Joyce and Ireland so fraught. What has been admired about Joyce’s style and art is precisely what complicates his position as an Irish writer. Famously, when asked late in life if he would ever return to Ireland he replied, “Have I ever left?”. From Trieste, he often wrote home asking for gossip and local newspapers. But it was once wisely said that “Ulysses is no more about Ireland than Moby Dick is about a whale—although no less”. Moby Dick very much is about a whale, but it is also about everything else, and to see Joyce as primarily a writer about Ireland and her politics is to mistake his fundamental aim. He wanted to reform his country, but he was loyal to art first.
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James Joyce was complicated—Odyssean, a man, as Edna O’Brien said, of blatant inconsistencies. “Joyce’s chaos is our chaos, his barbaric desires are ours too, and his genius is that he made such breathless transcendations out of such torrid stuff.” Ulysses is as Irish as a novel can be, but it is also personal, universal, chaotic, and confounding. Joyce was deeply shaped by Ireland, both his love and his hatred of it, and his work emerges primarily from his paradoxical personality, his ambivalent relationship to his homeland.
Ulysses can not be seen as a call to nationalism, even in defense of one’s country. Do not mistake it for a simple pacifist novel however, rather Ulysses is an embodiment of anarchism as individual freedom, as a vehicle towards actualizing who we want to be without letting authoritarian powers control us with violence. One could say this paradoxically makes Ulysses also a weapon of war, but understand who it is intended for, this is not a book to inspire the masses to exchange one nationalism for another.
Ulysses was the central part of a war fought in the US, and the fact that Ulysses somehow won and a period of relative cultural liberalism followed in the US was no guarantee, freedom never is, and it is a story almost entirely forgotten in the US. We forget the story of how Ulysses won a supreme court case in the US at our peril, if that needs to even be said at this point…
https://globalvoices.org/2025/07/06/the-magic-of-travel-three-ukrainian-women-writers-of-the-1930s/
oooh check this out!
With the literary tradition [Daria Vikonska] inherited from her family, her good education, and her erudition, Vikonska dedicated herself to intellectual pursuits. She was probably the first person in Ukraine to talk about James Joyce, writing a study in 1934 called “James Joyce: The Secret of His Artistic Face.”
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Her fate was tragic. After the first Soviet occupation, the family’s estates were confiscated. In 1939, when the USSR finally seized these territories, her husband was sent to the camps as an “exploiter” and died. During World War II, she went to Vienna, where on October 25, 1945, people from SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence unit that carried out repressions against real and potential enemies of the Soviet government, came to arrest her. Vikonska jumped out of the window to escape them and died.
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=443867
On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.
— Who has not? Stephen said.
— What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.
He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.
— History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
— The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
— That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
— What? Mr Deasy asked.
— A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
The words of a resistance fighter if there ever has been.
